Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

“CBO expects that the legislation would generate a reduction in the federal budgetary commitment to health care during the decade following 2019,” which is to say that this bill will cover 30 million people but the cost controls will, within a decade or so, leave us spending less on health care than if we’d done nothing. That’s a pretty good deal. But it’s not a very well-understood deal.

Indeed, because that’s not what the CBO said.

First, the CBO said the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” would rise by $210 billion between 2010 and 2019 under the Senate bill. Then, after 2019, it would fall from that higher level. And it could fall quite a bit before returning to its current level.

Second, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” is a concept that includes federal spending on health care and the tax revenue that the federal government forgoes due to health-care-related tax breaks, the largest being the exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance premiums. If Congress creates a new $1 trillion health care entitlement and finances it with deficit spending or an income-tax hike, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” rises by $1 trillion. But if Congress funds it by eliminating $1 trillion of health-care-related tax breaks, the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” would be unchanged, even though Congress just increased government spending by $1 trillion. That’s what the Senate bill’s tax on high-cost health plans does: by revoking part of the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance, it makes the projected growth in the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” appear smaller than the actual growth of government.

Last week, after Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) said that holders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s debt shouldn’t be expected to be treated the same as holders of U.S. government debt, the U.S. Treasury took the “unusual” step of reiterating its commitment to back Fannie and Freddie’s debt.

If ever there was case against allowing a few hundred men and women to micromanage the economy, this is it.

Fannie and Freddie, which are under government control, are being used to help prop up the ailing housing market. If investors think there’s a chance Uncle Sam won’t back the mortgage giants’ debt, mortgage interest rates could rise and demand for housing dampen. Therefore, Frank’s comments caused a bit of a stir. However, with the government bailing out anything that walks or crawls, investors apparently weren’t too concerned with Frank’s comments as the spread between Treasury and Fannie bonds barely budged.

As I noted a couple weeks ago, the Treasury is in no hurry to add Fannie and Freddie’s debt and mortgage-backed securities to the budget ($1.6 trillion and $5 trillion respectively). Congress certainly isn’t interested in raising the debt ceiling to make room. And as Arnold Kling points out, putting Fannie and Freddie on the government’s books would actually force the government to do something about the doddering duo.

All of which points to what an unfunny joke budgeting is in Washington. Take a look at what current OMB director Peter Orszag had to say about the issue when he was head of the Congressional Budget Office:

Given the steps announced by the Treasury Department and the Federal Housing Finance Agency on September 7, it is CBO’s view that the operations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be directly incorporated into the federal budget. The GSEs’ revenue would be treated as federal revenue and their expenditures as federal outlays, with appropriate adjustments for the manner in which credit transactions (like a mortgage guarantee) are reflected in the federal budget.

Note that Orszag wrote that statement less than two years ago. And since then, the bond between the government and the mortgage giants has only gotten tighter.

The same people that say Fannie and Freddie shouldn’t be on the government’s books are often the same people who once dismissed concerns that the two companies were headed toward financial ruin. In 2002, Orszag co-authored a paper at Fannie’s behest that concluded that “the probability of default by the GSEs is extremely small.”

Another one of those persons, Congressman Frank, has his fingerprints all over the housing meltdown. In 2003, a defiant Frank stated that “These two entities – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – are not facing any kind of financial crisis.” Frank couldn’t have been more wrong. Yet there he remains perched on his House Committee on Financial Services chairman’s seat, his every utterance so important that they can move interest rates.

The two large housing government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have been in government receivership since September 2008. The U.S. Treasury has given the housing GSEs $112 billion in cash infusions, and this past Christmas Eve it quietly announced it would cover all of Fannie and Freddie’s losses beyond the original $400 billion limit through 2012.

The president’s latest budget proposal continues to only count the cash infusions, which it projects to be $188 billion through 2020. On the other hand, the Congressional Budget Office also includes in its budget projections the subsidy cost of new loans or loan guarantees made by Fannie and Freddie, which results in a total projected hit of $370 billion through 2020.

[T]he Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded that the institutions had effectively become government entities whose operations should be included in the federal budget.

Is it not obvious to the administration? Of course it is, but the administration doesn’t want the GSEs “on budget” because it will only make already dismal deficits look worse. It also hinders any effort to count the GSE’s combined $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt against the ever-increasing federal debt limit. Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Geithner waived the idea away when he told the Senate Budget Committee that “we do not believe it’s necessary to consolidate the full obligations of those entities onto the balance sheet of the federal government at this stage.”

Geithner also told Congress the administration will now wait till 2011 to propose an overhaul of Fannie and Freddie. The Associated Press noted the hypocrisy in the administration’s punt:

‘We want to make sure that we are proposing these changes at a time when we have a little bit more distance from the worst housing crisis in generations,’ Geithner said. That argument is exactly the opposite of the case Geithner is making for new financial regulations. Geithner is pressing Congress to move swiftly on new Wall Street rules, saying action must occur before memories of the financial crisis recede.

Geithner said he wanted measures that would ensure “the government is playing a less risky, but more constructive, role in supporting housing markets in the future.” But government “support” of the housing market is what fueled the housing bubble and subsequent damage to the economy. Why should the arsonist be trusted to put out the fire?

Unfortunately, policymakers get a lot of self-serving prompting from the housing industry, as I discuss in this Cato Policy Analysis. For example, the National Association of Realtors is currently shopping a plan on Capitol Hill that would turn Fannie and Freddie into government-chartered non-profits explicitly backed by the government. Instead, policymakers should begin the process of separating housing finance and state by developing a plan to privatize Fannie and Freddie.

Even if Democrat Martha Coakley wins 50 percent of the vote in the race to fill the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s (ahem) term, there are other numbers emanating from Massachusetts that present a problem for President Obama’s health plan.

On Wednesday, the Cato Institute will release “The Massachusetts Health Plan: Much Pain, Little Gain,” authored by Cato adjunct scholar Aaron Yelowitz and yours truly. Our study evaluates Massachusetts’ 2006 health law, which bears a “remarkable resemblance” to the president’s plan. We use the same methodology as previous work by the Urban Institute, but ours is the first study to evaluate the effects of the Massachusetts law using Current Population Survey data for 2008 (i.e., from the 2009 March supplement). Since I’m sure that supporters of the Massachusetts law and the Obama plan will dismiss anything from Cato as ideologically motivated hackery: Yelowitz’s empirical work is frequently cited by the Congressional Budget Office, and includes one article co-authored with MIT health economist (and Obama administration consultant) Jonathan Gruber, under whom Yelowitz studied.

Among our findings:

Official estimates overstate the coverage gains under the Massachusetts law by roughly 50 percent.

The actual coverage gains may be lower still, because uninsured Massachusetts residents appear to be concealing their lack of insurance rather than admit to breaking the law.

Public programs crowded out private insurance among low-income children and adults.

Self-reported health improved for some, but fell for others.

Young adults appear to be avoiding Massachusetts as a result of the law.

Leading estimates understate the cost of the Massachusetts law by at least one third.

When Obama campaigns for Martha Coakley, he is really campaigning for his health plan, which means he is really campaigning for the Massachusetts health plan.

He and Coakley should explain why they’re pursuing a health plan that’s not only increasingly unpopular, but also appears to have a rather high cost-benefit ratio.

As President Obama is finding out, spending a trillion dollars on health care reform is easy; paying for it is a bit harder.

Both the House and Senate versions contain huge tax increases. But they take completely different approaches toward which taxes are hiked and who would pay them. And, as President Obama discovered in yesterday’s contentious meeting with labor bosses, those differences will not be easy to resolve.

The Senate wants to slap a 40 percent excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” insurance plans, that is plans with an actuarial value of more than $8,500 for an individual and $23,000 for a family. The tax technically falls on the insurance company that offers the plan, but there’s widespread recognition that insurers will merely pass that tax on to their customers in the form of still-higher premiums. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that initially about 19 percent of insurance plans would be subject to the tax, and union surveys suggest that it could hit as many as 25 percent of union workers. Moreover, as inflation drives costs higher, more and more plans will be subject to the tax. That is because the threshold for the tax is indexed to general inflation not medical inflation which runs higher.

As today’s Washington Post editorial points out, economists and deficit hawks see this measure as one of the few cost-control provisions left in the bill. Its goal is not just to raise some $150 billion in revenue over 10 years, but to discourage the type of “gold plated” insurance plans that encourage over utilization and drive up costs. That is why the Obama administration has endorsed this approach.

However, as labor leaders made clear in yesterday’s meeting with the president, this middle-class tax hike is unacceptable. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka has even threatened to retaliate at the polls against Democrats who vote for it. In addition, 124 House Democrats have signed a letter opposing the “Cadillac tax.” With just a three vote margin, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi cannot afford to have any defections from tax opponents.

The House, on the other hand, has gone with a “soak the rich” strategy, calling for a surtax on incomes of $500,000 or more a year. But Democrats already plan to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire next year, raising income taxes for millions of Americans. An income tax surtax on top of that would mean marginal tax rates of more than 50 percent in many states with devastating consequences for economic growth. Moderate Democratic Senators like Ben Nelson (Neb.) and even liberals from states with high cost of living like Chuck Schumer (NY) are unlikely to go along with this tax. And, in the Senate, Democrats can’t afford even a single “no” vote.

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that a health care bill is inevitable. But if the growing fight over taxes is any indication, inevitability is overrated.

In 2009, congressional Democrats fashioned their health care legislation out of public view. That enabled them to avoid some public intra-party spats; to hide maybe 60 percent of the cost of the legislation and otherwisegame the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring rules; to deny the public enough time to learn about how the legislation would work; and to cram the legislation through the Senate the day before Christmas. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s backroom negotiations are rightfully infamous.

Let me be clear that Democrats are not violating any rules of which I am aware. But one senses that the object here is not the sort of good government or open government that the Left claims to seek. Rather, the object is power. As my colleague Will Wilkinson writes, “They seem interested primarily in how a temporary majority can do more, faster, now.” And a key tactic is to hide from the public as much of the process as possible.